CLEVELAND, Ohio – One can only imagine how ESPN might have handled the story had it been broadcasting in 1946.

Golden-boy quarterback, married to Hollywood starlet, leads Cleveland to an NFL championship in his rookie season, only to see team owner become the first to relocate a franchise to Los Angeles and re-integrate pro football.

Forget the Yankees and Joe DiMaggio. Never mind the buildup to the Joe Louis-Billy Conn fight. No developing story, with its hooks in sports, Hollywood, pop culture and social change, would have dominated the airwaves knowing how we now report and consume news. The Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless of their time would have debated The Cleveland Rams’ departure ad nauseam:

"It will go down as the biggest decision in Cleveland sports history and you can write that in 100-point Comic Sans."

Generations of local fans have been conditioned to expect the worst when hearing of a star athlete or team wanting to go elsewhere. Few cities can match our scar tissue -- Art Modell takes the Browns to Baltimore; LeBron spurns the Cavs for Miami; Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Albert Belle leave the Indians for free-agent riches.

But with another Super Bowl complete and the Rams once again making eyes at L.A., it’s time to remind the fan base of the most audacious and important relocation in sports history. Dan Reeves’ choice to transfer his franchise from Cleveland to the West Coast represents the rarest of moves – one that benefited all parties.

Despite fellow owners’ initial protests, the NFL had a team in Los Angeles a decade before baseball would follow its lead. The Rams’ move enabled the expansion Browns of the All-American Football Conference to grow unfettered into a dynasty and merge with the NFL. And both franchises would re-integrate pro football with four black players in 1946.

“It truly was the perfect storm,” said author and football historian Chris Willis, who works for NFL Films. “It was a win-win for everyone, and you don’t see that happen very often in these type of situations.”

The Browns and Los Angeles Rams, who moved from Cleveland, met twice for the NFL title in 1950 and 1951 with each sides winning once.

The Browns and the AAFC were set to open in 1946 regardless of whether the Rams had stayed. But in an era when baseball was still America’s most popular game, imagine Clevelanders having to choose their football allegiances: Support Brown and his band of regional players? Or the reigning NFL champions with league MVP Bob Waterfield and his voluptuous wife Jane Russell?

TMZ would have opened a regional office at the Hotel St. Regis on Euclid Avenue where the couple resided.

Browns de facto historian Steve King said the upstart franchise would have welcomed the competition – which it got four years later in the 1950 NFL Championship Game. But even in economic boom times with the nation’s sixth-largest population reaching 900,000 in the late ‘40s, Cleveland would have been hard pressed to buttress the Rams and Browns.

“If both teams stay, history probably would have been rewritten,” Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Joe Horrigan said. “We probably would have had only one team survive, and we don’t know which team it would have been.

“Cleveland at that time probably wouldn’t have been able to support two pro football teams in two pro football leagues . . . Let’s just say the Rams were the winner in this duel, we might not be celebrating the legacies of Paul Brown, Marion Motley, Bill Willis, Lou Groza, Dante Lavelli and others who played for those first teams in the All-American Football Conference.”

Browns are comin’

The Hall of Fame elected its newest class on Saturday in New York. Once again, Modell’s name was not called. Unlike a year ago, the late Browns and Ravens owner did not reach the finals.

One argument proffered by Modell loyalists involves Reeves, who earned HOF enshrinement in 1967 four years before his death. Why is one Cleveland owner allowed to move his team and gain passage into Canton while other is not?

It’s a challenge that often crumbles in the presence of context.

Late Rams owner Dan Reeves, right, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967. Reeves moved the Rams from Cleveland to Los Angeles in 1946.

The NFL was not a multibillion-dollar industry when Reeves bought the Rams from a group of local investors in 1941 for the tidy sum of $135,000. Some players made just $100 per game and had to play both ways to earn it.

The franchise was only nine years old when Reeves moved it in ‘46. Nate Wallack, the Rams former public relations chief who later worked for the Browns, told The Plain Dealer in 1980 the team had a season-ticket base of roughly 200 fans.

Horrigan, who doesn’t take sides in the Modell debate, offered additional perspective.

“(The Rams were) not engrained in the community,” he said. “Had the Indians left, it would have been much more devastating to the fan base . . . (Unlike Modell) it wasn’t this marriage being dissolved when they left. But when Art left, the roots of the game and the Browns were so embedded and stung so much more.”

If current Browns fans think ill of Dan Reeves, it’s probably because they mistake him for the former Denver Broncos coach of the same name who helped deny their team three Super Bowl trips in the Bernie Kosar era.

There is no relation. In fact, there were few quite like Daniel Farrell Reeves, a New York native who came from money and made more of it running an investment firm. Short and fastidious, Reeves was seemingly born to challenge authority and conventional thinking.

“He was the Al Davis of his day,” Horrigan said. “He was also a maverick, a progressive thinker in a league that was not particularly progressive at that time. He was the new kid on the block who had ideas which not only were rejected but considered foolhardy.”

Nobody of Reeves’ generation grew up wanting to own a pro football franchise. Tim Mara had never seen a pro game, Horrigan said, before founding the New York Giants in 1925. Neither had Cleveland Rams principal owner Homer Marchman, who told The Plain Dealer he invested out of civic pride.

In an era when other wealthy sportsmen bought baseball teams and racehorses, Reeves made unsuccessful bids on the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers before landing the Rams at age 29.

“Isn’t it the dream of every American male to own a football team?” Reeves told Sports Illustrated years later.

As the United States entered World War II, the Rams owner became an Army lieutenant. Many players joined the service, while others worked in war plants to stay clear of the draft. Reeves received NFL permission to suspend the team for the 1943 season due to a manpower shortage.

A year later, the Rams resumed play and the AAFC began formulating plans for a 1946 debut with eight teams, including ones in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The rival league’s biggest coup was getting Brown to coach the Cleveland entry after his wartime commitment to the Great Lakes Navel Training Station had ended.

“Paul Brown was the Jim Tressel of his time,” King said. “He was an Ohio native who won all those titles at Massillon and a national championship at Ohio State.”

Brown successfully recruited players from OSU and around the region, as well as former Northwestern quarterback Otto Graham, who had been drafted in 1944 by the NFL’s Detroit Lions.

“You look at their roster and they had Lavelli, Groza and Willis from Ohio State and Motley from Canton,” King said. “Not only were they a good team, but they had a lot of players fans recognized.”

Without having played a game, Reeves understood the threat the Browns posed. He also saw the college game’s growing popularity out West and the absence of an NFL franchise there.

If only he had a Hollywood connection.

Power couple

Cleveland fans almost have forgotten what it’s like to have a decent quarterback. That wasn’t the case in 1946. If the Rams had stayed, the city would have been host to a pair of future Hall of Famers playing simultaneously.

Of course, only one was married to WWII pin-up girl.

Actress Jane Russell was married to Cleveland Rams quarterback Bob Waterfield and they resided in a downtown hotel.

A decade before DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe wed, Cleveland was home to one of pop culture's first power couples, Waterfield and Russell. They had been high school sweethearts before UCLA made him a star quarterback and Howard Hughes transformed her into a national heartthrob in the '43 film Outlaw.

The duo lived at the Hotel St. Regis a year after the Rams made the quarterback/defensive back/kicker a fifth-round draft pick. As Waterfield led the Rams to a 9-1 record, winning league MVP honors as a rookie, the national media descended on Cleveland.

“I got a call from Life Magazine (and) they wanted to do a cover story on Jane Russell and Waterfield,” Wallack said. “I called the movie studio in Hollywood. The studio did not want to publicize the fact that she was married. I went to the St. Regis to talk with Jane. That was an experience. She was gorgeous – and built. I told her my problem with the studio.

“I’ll never forget what she said: ‘I’ll cooperate with you on anything that’s good for Robert and Rams.’ She was a living doll.”

A team that attracted few fans – it managed 11,000 for its home opener -- suddenly had a following. The Rams moved the 1945 NFL title game against Washington from League Park to Municipal Stadium, where 32,178 fans braved near-zero temperatures to watch the home side defeat the Redskins, 15-14.

Fans burned hay, designed to keep the field from freezing, and sections of bleachers to stay warm. According to a Plain Dealer account, alcohol may have been involved.

“A veteran of attendance at football games in every major stadium in the country said he had never seen so many inebriates in crowds even three time as large,” wrote reporter Chads O Skinner in describing the scene.

What revelers did not know is they were witnessing the Rams’ final game in Cleveland.

Moving experience

The old guard at the 1946 NFL owners meeting was not worried about the long-term future of football or how advances in wartime aviation would improve commercial travel. It was all about preserving status quo.

Who wins a championship and wants to leave town? Why relocate a franchise 2,000 miles from its nearest league rival? Reeves’ peers voted against his proposed move to Los Angeles despite the fact the 1945 UCLA-USC game had drawn 103,000 fans.

"And you call this a national league," Reeves is quoted as shouting in the Last of the Headbangers. "Well, you can consider the Cleveland Rams out of pro football."

Owners eventually compromised – Reeves adding $5,000 per game for visiting teams to their customary 40 percent of the gate.

It didn’t take long for league patriarchs to realize the wisdom in Reeves’ thinking. Pro football on the West Coast thrived. The AAFC’s Los Angeles Dons and San Francisco 49ers enjoyed success, with the Niners being absorbed by the 1950 merger.

“In retrospect, owners are darn glad he went out there, otherwise the AAFC would have had foothold in L.A. and San Francisco and they would have become a threat to the NFL’s existence had they not put a franchise in Los Angeles.”

History paints Reeves as a visionary and innovator. He employed the first full-time scouting staff, instituted a “Free Football for Kids” program, waiving admission for children, and was one of the first owners to broadcast his team’s road games on television. From 1948 to 1954, the number of American TV sets rose by 14,500 percent.

Yoking football with Tinseltown, his teams produced some of the game’s most glamorous players, starting with Waterfield. The marriage of sports and celebrity is commonplace today and Reeves helped pioneer it.

“He saw the value of Hollywood,” Horrigan said.

The move to Los Angeles also produced more substantive change.

The NFL featured 13 black players in its first 14 years of existence. But with America in the throes of the Great Depression, the league would not include any minorities from 1933-45.

Former Browns lineman John Wooten, now the chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, said Paul Brown judged players on their skills and character and not on the color their skin.

“(The owners) banned black players simply for the fact they were taking jobs away from white players,” said former Browns guard John Wooten, chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, which promotes diversity and equality in NFL coaching and front office hires.

The Los Angeles Coliseum Commission required the Rams to sign black players as part of the agreement for playing in the public venue. Reeves complied by adding former UCLA stars Kenny Washington and Woody Strode a year before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier,

In Cleveland, Brown needed no such civic prompting. Minority athletes had been part of his previous teams, including Ohio State. Motley and Willis, a pair of future Hall of Famers, were members of the ’46 Browns.

“Paul Brown knew black players had great skills, and credit him for standing up for what he knew was right,” Wooten said. “He used to say, ‘I don’t have white players, I don’t have black players, I have Cleveland Browns’ players.’ He judged you by your skill and character.”

Art Modell supporters have gotten nowhere with the argument that equates his franchise move with that of Dan Reeves' move.

The Browns, who played before 60,135 fans in their AAFC debut, quickly made fans forget the loss of the Rams. They played in an outrageous 10 consecutive AAFC and NFL title games.

Fittingly, the franchises met twice for the NFL championship in 1950 and 1951, the sides splitting the games with each winning at home. The first showdown, won by the Browns, 30-28 on a last-minute Groza field goal, featured 12 future Hall of Famers.

“You couldn’t make this stuff up,” King said. “The Browns enter the NFL in 1950 and play the team that left town.”

The ’51 championship marked Reeves’ last title. Despite some lean seasons, he never lost his enthusiasm for the game or his concern for its future. As owners bickered over a new NFL commissioner in 1960, Reeves selflessly suggested his sun-kissed general manager as a compromise candidate. His name was Pete Rozelle.

Two years later, as the Rams endured organizational reshuffling, Reeves paid $4.2 million at auction to retain controlling interest. After the purchase, he famously phoned his wife with the news.

“We bought the Rams,” he said. “Can we afford it?”

The franchise was valued at $20 million at the time of his death. Reeves did not live long enough to see the popularity of the pro game wane in L.A.

In 1995, the Rams and Raiders both left town. A year later, Modell moved his franchise to Baltimore. The NFL has not returned to Los Angeles. Given the history of organizational dysfunction, some say the same of Cleveland.

A week ago, it was learned St. Louis Rams owner Stan Kroenke had purchased a stadium-sized tract of land in L.A., fueling speculation the franchise might return.

ESPN and other major media outlets will relentlessly cover the developing story only wishing it had the sex appeal and significance of Reeves’ maverick move from Cleveland a lifetime ago.